Most plastic will never be recycled – and the manufacturers couldn’t care less | Arwa Mahdawi

Oil and gas companies make far more money churning out new plastic than reusing old. Meanwhile, the public gets the blame

Plastic recycling is a scam. You diligently sort your rubbish, you dutifully wash your plastic containers, then everything gets tossed in a landfill or thrown in the ocean anyway. OK, maybe not everything - but the vast majority of it. According to one analysis, only 9% of all plastic ever made has likely been recycled. Here's the kicker: the companies making all that plastic have spent millions on advertising campaigns lecturing us about recycling while knowing full well that most plastic will never be recycled.

A new investigation by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reports that the large oil and gas companies that manufacture plastics have known for decades that recycling plastic was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale because of the high costs involved. They were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Larry Thomas, former president of one of the plastic industry's most powerful trade groups, told NPR. There is a lot more money to be made in selling new plastic than reusing the old stuff. But, in order to keep selling new plastic, the industry had to clean up its wasteful image. If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Thomas noted. And so a huge amount of resources were diverted into intricate sustainability theatre".